osprey_archer | Book Review: Tales from Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tales of Earthsea is a collection of novellas and short stories that form a bridge between Tehanu and The Other Wind. It is also, like Tehanu, is an argument with the refrain repeated in A Wizard of Earthsea: “Weak as women’s magic, wicked as women’s magic.”

Now this refrain is well worth arguing with: it was one of the reasons I quit Earthsea and indeed all of Le Guin in a huff when I was about eleven. But I felt that Tales of Earthsea retconned the established Earthsea worldbuilding just a bit too hard to feel real, while also doubling down on my least favorite element in Tehanu, which on the whole I thought grappled with the inequality baked into the Earthsea premise far more successfully.

The first story, “The Finder,” is about the establishment of the school of wizardry on Roke Island. In A Wizard of Earthsea, Roke has a strong medieval Oxford vibe as an all-male college staffed by celibates; in “The Finder,” however, we are informed that at the beginning, Roke was founded by and accepted both male and female students (and later stories tell us that later on the first archmage barred male students).

I can see why Le Guin wanted to give Roke this egalitarian beginning, and I will spot her the fact that it’s possible that Roke could have begun as a coed institution and then everyone forgot about it. Shades of the Disney animation studio, where the female animators hired in the 1970s believed they were the first female animators at Disney, even though female animators made up 40% of the staff in the 1940s!

But at the same time I just didn’t buy it. There are no hints in the earlier books, and there’s no proper explanation how the switch from a co-ed to an all-male institution occurred, and it also just felt too convenient to make Roke an institution founded on pure and egalitarian principles, rather than an institution founded with genuine good intentions and also stunning blind spots that is, perhaps, ready to begin to change.

This change begins in “Dragonfly,” when a girl called Dragonfly attempts to disguise herself as a boy to study on Roke. She is instantly caught (wizards, after all), hangs out for a while in the Imminent Grove while the masters argue whether or not to admit her, then turns into a dragon, defeats her main opponent (who is, conveniently, already dead, but has summoned himself back to life), and flies away to find her dragon kin.

Again, I get this as wish fulfillment: haven’t we all had a moment when we would like to defeat some obstructive fuddy-duddy with our magical dragon powers! But at the same time I found it disappointing in the same way I found it disappointing, at the end of Tehanu, when Therru turned out to be a dragon child. In both cases I wanted the character to be enough as she was, and to have them both be dragon-humans, more than human, undercuts the egalitarianism of the message. As both books specifically aim to create a more egalitarian Earthsea, that’s a real problem.